Great charter schools can go beyond their students to improve the education landscape for everyone. That’s why we say this movement is not about a particular kind of governance structure, it’s about great public schools.
The spill-over benefits from charter schools often involve innovation and sharing, but old-fashioned competition also has its place.
This morning’s New York Times carries a perfect example. Jennifer Medina reports that district schools in Harlem are trying to boost enrollment by actively recruiting parents—which leads to detailed conversations about what the schools have to offer.
This new emphasis on attracting parents is a sign of the pressure district schools feel from nearby charter schools, which sign up hopeful parents by the thousands. When that causes district schools to see their enrollments dwindle, and worry about possible closure, connecting with parents takes on a new importance.
Does extra marketing create achievement? Of course not.
But a heightened sense of urgency and responsiveness is good news for district students, just as the need to appeal to parents has always been a productive pressure on charters. This isn’t a zero-sum game.
In the space of a week, three major magazines have turned their focus to the revolution happening in public school teaching.
In “Building a Better Teacher,” The NYT Magazine describes how leaders in the field are bringing new scrutiny to teachers’ classroom practices, content knowledge, and incentives.
In “What Makes a Great Teacher?,” The Atlantic reports on what Teach for America has learned about selecting teachers over the years, and what does and doesn’t predict success. (Hint: not a master's in education.)
In “Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers,” Newsweek reviews the struggle to do just that.
As always in these stories of educational progress against entrenched opposition, charter schools emerge as a theme. Charters are where educators have the autonomy to experiment and grow what works for students, without the weight of a bureaucracy designed by and for grown-up interests.
But charter schools aren't the story, nor should they be. As we like to say, it’s about great public schools.
UPDATE: Via GothamSchools, Doug Lemov talks teaching on NPR.
Saturday's New York Timesreported on the curious case of State Senator Bill Perkins, who “wars against” charter schools despite representing so many of them--and despite having benefited from educational choice himself. (Economist Tyler Cowen is “astounded.”) If you haven’t, go read the whole thing.
Perkins holds two core beliefs about charter schools:
1. Demand for charters shows that district schools are bad. 2. But charter schools are not meaningfully better.
Isn’t that a contradiction? Why would parents flock to schools that are no better? Ah, but Perkins holds a third belief that squares the circle. As he tells the Times:
“I understand… parents being concerned and willing to do whatever they need to do to get the best education for their children and get it whatever way they can. My concern is that they are being sold something that is hype, that is all about creating more demand.”
In other words, after ten years of charter schools in Harlem, parents are applying by the tens of thousands because they fell for the hype. Call it...
PERKINS' LAW: "Parents want the best education for their children, but only Bill Perkins can be trusted to recognize it."
Someone should try explaining Perkins’ Law to Ebony Brown, a Harlem parent with children at both public and charter schools. She somehow has the impression that the charter school is more attentive, responsive, organized, and effective.
You know, it’s just so sad to see a parent with this degree of false consciousness. If Ms. Brown ever wants to see past the smoke and mirrors, she should run for State Senate.
UPDATED to correct a word in the Perkins quote, above.
Today the U.S. Department of Education announced the finalists in the first round of the Race to the Top competition, and New York is among them. This keeps the Empire State in the running for up to $700 million in much-needed funding.
That’s huge. And nobody saw it coming.
Don’t start adjusting those budgets yet, though. The real surprise was the size of the field: while most observers expected only a handful of finalists, Duncan named sixteen of them, while rejecting 25 other applicants.
Charter Center CEO James Merriman had this to say:
“Today’s announcement is a credit to the strong reform agenda championed by Commissioner Steiner and the Board of Regents. Being named in the top third of Race to the Top applicants is an important step toward $700 million in much-needed federal funding, but the critical stage is still ahead.
“The President, the Secretary, and the Board of Regents have all called for two reforms that could make the difference in a tight race: lifting the artificial cap on charter schools and providing equity in charter school funding. Since there’s no prize money for finishing in sixteenth place, the state should act quickly to pass these reforms and bolster its chances of winning the competition.”
There’s one burning question that has hung around NYC’s charter schools debate for years: what amount of public resources do charters have to work with, compared to district schools? Are they doing more with less, or taking more than their share? The question is enormously important for questions about fairness as well as cost-effectiveness.
Since school funding is so complicated, however, developing numbers with any rigor is a huge job—and anyone motivated enough to try is probably an advocate of some kind. So the whole debate has been stuck in the mud of he-said, she-said.
Enter the IBO, New York City’s nonpartisan Independent Budget Office.
Acting on a request from charter critic Patrick Sullivan, the IBO developed a detailed comparison of the resources available for general education: what charter schools receive vs. what the Department of Education spends, per pupil, per year. In-kind services and shared space were given a dollar value and factored in. The IBO’s conclusion?Charter schools receive less: $305 less per pupil if they are housed in a district building, and $3,017 less per pupil if they aren’t.
This is a landmark finding, from an independent (if not charter-hostile) third party with access to all the numbers. Even at charter schools housed in district space, even with all school buses and custodians and textbooks and other services factored in, charter school students have fewer resources allocated for their education.
Talk about an inconvenient truth.
There is good reason to think the IBO study actually understates the funding disparities that charter schools face, but we can take that up later. With the basic facts about this inequality clear, there’s a new burning question: what are we going to do about it?
The teachers union's campaign to force charter schools to enroll as many high-needs students as traditional public schools may have to begin in its own backyard.
Just 9% of kids at the UFT charter school are special education students, compared with 14% in the Brooklyn district where it's located. Only 1% of students at the school speak English as a second language, compared with 14% in the district as a whole....
The UFT's response?
"That's why we recommended the law, because we know we aren't serving the neediest students," said UFT President Michael Mulgrew.
Wow.
Why would the UFT wait for a change in the law to stop participating in what its own report calls a “system [that] is sorting students along ethnic and racial lines, undermining the pluralism and diversity found in City public schools (p. 10).” It’s not like it’s illegal to serve more than 1% ELL students.
The facts are awkward for the UFT because it wants to blame “charter schools’ self-regulated, market-based system of choice-based enrollment (p. 10).” As President Mulgrew blustered in the union paper, when charter schools' "purpose is perverted, when schools are not trying to help all children, but aim to game the system in order to beat the ‘competition,’ we have to call them out on it.”
But now the UFT Charter School has been called out in the Daily News. If “not trying” and "gam[ing] the system" is what generally causes enrollment differences, what is the UFT’s excuse? Or could it be, as James Merriman suggested in the Daily News piece, that this issue comes back to practical challenges rather than bad faith?
So here’s an invitation to President Mulgrew: the Charter Center supports two consortiums of charter schools that work together to get better at recruiting, serving, and retaining special education students and ELLs, respectively. To date, the UFT Charter School has not joined either one. Why not stop the posturing and help us get this right?
Last week, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation reported on the astonishing inequality between public schools across the United States. There are 2,817 schools in the United States in which fewer than 5 percent of students live in poverty; in some areas one in four white children attend such schools.
The Fordham Foundation rightly labels these “private public schools.” They are taxpayer-funded and governmentally operated—but only slightly more accessible to the poor or average citizen than a mid-winter’s sojourn to Mustique. In Scarsdale, for example, a starter home costs $680,000 and there aren’t many of them. Even if you can afford the house, there are the property taxes that start at around $9,000 and zoom upwards. A big chunk of those taxes are essentially “public school tuition.” No one living in and around New York will be surprised to hear that in the metro area, 13 percent of district schools are basically free of poor people. In contrast, there is not a single charter school in the same area that comes anywhere near that.
Fordham's report doesn't name any New York City schools, but by urban standards we have our public private schools, too. Given the UFT’s present obsession with precise demographic balancing between charter schools and district schools, one might suppose that the union would have spoken out about this phenomenon. After all, UFT President Michael Mulgrew and his loyal coterie of advocacy organizations enthusiastically trumpeted a report that (1) acknowledged that charter school students were overwhelmingly poor but (2) based on their data, slightly less poor on average than students in nearby district managed schools.
Even these minor differences merited a press conference, numerous TV appearances, and a report whose title is meant to invoke the educational apartheid sanctioned by Plessy v. Ferguson.
So one would think that the UFT and its friends would be outraged to know that:
• PS 234 in TriBeCa had a whopping 6 percent of students are eligible for free lunch, the union's preferred metric for poverty (as opposed to free/reduced).
• PS 6, cozily ensconced on the Upper East Side, also boasts a free-lunch rate of 6 percent.
• And then there’s Staten Island, President Mulgrew’s stomping grounds, where one elementary school enrolled only 9 African American students (1%) and only 17 percent free-lunch eligible students.
By contrast, the UFT’s charter report calculated that 86 percent of students in South Bronx schools are eligible for free lunch. Eighty-six percent. True, their stats show that those schools enroll slightly more of the very poorest kids than in neighboring charter schools. But it’s also true that the South Bronx has more than 15 times more of the poorest students than in certain public schools in Manhattan.
So when is the press conference in TriBeCa? When is the protest rally in Douglaston? When will we see a UFT report on the “separate and unequal” conditions between the Upper East Side and East New York? Equally, when will the UFT call for a moratorium on building new schools in wealthy areas until every child in the South Bronx is in a new school building? When will it call for demographic balancing as it did for charter schools? When will it demand that these reforms be part of a Race to the Top application?
After all, in President Mulgrew’s ringing words: the “first rule of public schools [is] to provide equal opportunity for all children.” And yet with all that, so far not a word, not a whisper from the UFT or other like-minded advocacy groups.
I puzzled and puzzled over this seeming inconsistency: slight imbalance in charter v district demographics = very bad; huge imbalances intra- and inter-district = not a problem. But then I finally got it. Maybe, while ordinary people think equal opportunity means giving all children a first-rate education, what the union really means is only this: All children must be given the equal opportunity to be taught by one of their dues-paying members.
Now when you think of it this way, there’s no inconsistency at all.
In a Daily News Op-Ed this morning, charter school parent (and Lobby Day emcee) Valerie Babb* has strong words for state lawmakers: “We're tired of seeing our kids treated like second-class students when it comes to funding.”
More accounts of yesterday's events:
Gotham Schools: “Hundred of parents of charter school students from all over the city climbed into buses bound for Albany in the pre-dawn hours this morning.”
Times Union: “The annual rally, which included representatives from 86 schools, was about three times the size of last year's, and comes at a time when the charter school debate has stalled in the Legislature.”
NY Post: “The rowdy throng of charter supporters marched on the Senate chamber to demand a meeting with Sen. Bill Perkins (D-Manhattan), who emerged last month as one of the most vocal opponents to Paterson's failed bid to expand charter schools statewide."
Finally, more TV news coverage from WBRG. For the record: reporter Steve Flamisch found a cute angle in that story, but charter school supporters haven’t forgotten a thing. We're hoping the Governor gives us reasons to keep cheering.
UPDATED to add a photo of (part of) the Lobby Day crowd. Credit: John Smock
*Valerie is director of the Charter Parent Advocacy Network, a new group incubating at the Charter Center.
Yesterday’s rally in Albany sent a big, loud, proud message about the importance of public charter schools. Among the highlights:
-Thousands of charter school parents, students, teachers, and younger siblings pouring into Convention Hall with caps, shirts, banners, and pre-planned chants.
-An overriding tone of pride and respectful concern – some well-directed boos notwithstanding.
-Gov. Paterson telling the story of how he changed his mind about charter schools.
-Love from the crowd for lawmakers who have consistently stood up for charter schools, among them Assemblymen Michael Benjamin and Sam Hoyt, and Senator Craig Johnson.
-Senator Martin Golden, another charter stalwart, leading a borough-check and confirming that Brooklyn was indeed in the house. (Just like Harlem, the Bronx, Queens, Long Island, Buffalo…)
-A cameo appearance by the inspiring and gracious Rev. A.R. Bernard.
-An afternoon of meetings with lawmakers and legislative staff, to put faces with the policy issues.
Here’s how two local television stations covered the event:
More Lobby Day links, photos, and videos coming soon…
Today's the day! Over 3,000 charter school parents, students, teachers, and supporters are on their way to Albany to send lawmakers a loud and clear message: charter schools are public schools and deserve nothing less than fair treatment! Watch this space for updates.
ork Times 
Today the U.S. Department of Education 
